Archive for the ‘Lime Rock Park’ tag

One of the great things about being into cars, or any kind of vehicles, is seeing how willingly the people who love them will reach out to help others. This is a great example. This Saturday, April 13, Lime Rock Park road circuit in Connecticut will host an enormous car, truck and motorcycle show to benefit the survivors and first responders of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre last December. More than 3,000 cars, trucks and bikes will be coming in convoys from starting points as distant as New Jersey, Maryland and Texas, plus all over New England.

The show is called Spikes Ride for Sandy Hook at Lime Rock Park, and is being organized by George “Spikes” LeGrice of Raynham, Massachusetts. Two local convoys are looking for vehicles to join. One will leave the commuter parking lot at Exit 42 on Route 8 at 7:30 a.m. and cruise to New Milford, where it will join another group leaving from the George Washington Plaza in Gaylordsville, Connecticut, beginning at 6:45 a.m. Another convoy will leave from the Stadium Sports Bar & Grille in Waterbury at 7:30 a.m.

Car owners who want to show a vehicle at Lime Rock should arrive at the track between 7 and 9 a.m. Show donations are $15 for cars and bikes; $20 for pickups and bobtails. The spectator donation is $5. One Newtown beneficiary is the Sandy Hook Family Healing Fund, started by parents in Newtown to assist the survivors from the two classrooms where the shootings took place. It’s a 501(c)(3) non-profit. The other is Adopt a Sandy Hook Cop, started by Mother’s Embrace Yoga from Shelton, Connecticut, to support the Newtown Police Department. Money collected is provided directly to the Newtown Police Department liaison, which in turn distributes the funds to officers in need.

Lime Rock Park is located in extreme northwestern Connecticut just off U.S. 44. For more information, visit LimeRock.com.

UPDATE (16.April 2013): More than 2,400 vehicles showed up to the event, helping raise $26,000. Some photos are on Lime Rock’s Facebook page.

When we heard that Sir Stirling Moss was going to be the guest of honor at Lime Rock Park’s 30th annual vintage festival over Labor Day weekend, well, we couldn’t burn it getting down there fast enough. Sir Stirling exuded a lot of candor about his unforgettable career, which officially ended only last year – he is 83 – and will be the topic of an in-depth, exclusive feature coming soon in Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.

It’s been a good 50 years since Sir Stirling, having slithered away from death after a savage Goodwood crash, raced a car in genuine anger. Yet to an extent, he hasn’t stepped away yet. Several Moss-driven icons ranging from a Maserati 250F to a Vanwall were under power at the event, yet Sir Stirling chose to lap the OSCA MT4 that he and Bill Lloyd shared to score an unbelievable come-from-behind win during the 1954 12 Hours of Sebring. The OSCA, owned by Briggs Cunningham, ran down several much bigger cars to win overall by five laps. It remains the smallest-displacement car ever to win at Sebring. Sir Stirling took a couple of laps of honor in the OSCA, now part of the Collier Collection at the Revs Institute of Naples, Florida, with Lady Susie Moss alongside him. It was great, timeless stuff, and I’m glad I got to experience it.

If you’re a fan of vintage racing and you live east of the Mississippi, chances are good that you’ve been to Lime Rock Park’s annual Labor Day weekend celebration. If you haven’t, this would be an excellent year to head to this beautiful corner of northwestern Connecticut, what with Sir Stirling Moss heading the guest list.

Applications are also being accepted for the companion Sunday in the Park concours, which takes place on September 2. More than 200 top-quality cars are expected for this year’s concours, which stretches from the downhill to Big Bend, with another 500 or so cars expected for the Gathering of the Clubs, which fills most of the rest of the 1.51-mile track.

Don’t own a qualifying race car? You’re invited, too. All fans get free passes to the paddock areas with their admission, so you can get up close to the machinery and chat with the owners and drivers.

The Ferraris came to Lime Rock Park last weekend. You wouldn’t have heard them unless you were right at the track, nestled in the hills of Connecticut’s Litchfield County. There, you would have gotten an earful, from the shrieks of the 458 Italias and F430s to the basso profundo roar of a 250GT Boano (above). The occasion was the return of the modern Ferrari Challenge to Lime Rock for the first time since 2005; it was accompanied by the separate Shell Historic Races, dedicated to pre-1982 Ferraris, Maseratis and vintage Alfa Romeos that would have raced with the early Scuderia Ferrari team. Four races were run: two for the F430/458 group, and two for the Historics.

Ferrari rented the track, and all of Paddock A, for the July 30 event, which drew tifosi by the thousands. Even without the race cars on the track, there were dozens of Ferraris to admire, parked in the Ferrari Corral and in the special area set up for members of the online community FerrariChat. Ferrari dealers from across the U.S. and Canada, who sponsor the modern racing efforts, also had new Ferraris on display – like the FF below.

Between the morning and afternoon races, Ferrari owners were given the opportunity for a parade lap or three around Lime Rock’s 1.53-mile course. Here, they wait for the start.

In my line of work, I get the chance to talk with many legends of the auto industry – men who have shaped automotive history in some way in the pursuit of speed, safety, profit, fame, glory or their own ideas of what is right and wrong, automobile-wise. A few months ago, I was lucky enough to have spoken with John Fitch for a Hot Rod Hero article in Hemmings Muscle Machines, and when he invited me down to his place in Lime Rock, Connecticut, I jumped at the chance to meet him in person.

John, at 92, has done just about everything. Briefly, he studied engineering, quit college, visited Europe before World War II, trained as a fighter pilot, was shot down in the war and held as a POW, owned an MG dealership back in the States, sailed around the Gulf of Mexico for a year, raced for Briggs Cunningham, Chevrolet and Mercedes at pretty much every track in North America and Europe, invented the Fitch Safety Barrier, tuned Corvairs, tried to build his own limited-production sports car, helped found and manage Lime Rock Park and written and talked extensively on all of the above.

And he’s still very active. Tall and lean as ever, he greeted me at the door in no less than a red blazer, plaid wool pants, dapper cap and his tie tucked in between the buttons of his shirt. He apologized for the disarray of his house – his wife died recently, and he’s reverted to a bachelor lifestyle, with papers stacked everywhere. He produced a stack of envelopes from his blazer pocket and said he carried them around to jot down ideas and notes – eventually, the stack grows too big for the pocket, so he wraps the stack in a rubber band and starts a new collection of notes. Though he’s donated some of his effects to the Saratoga Auto Museum, memorabilia from a lifetime of involvement in sports cars – photographs, posters, car show placards, programs from honorary events, trophies tarnished over time – hang around the place like forgotten friends. John seems less interested in nostalgia than in whatever activity he may be currently engaged in. “I have my own priorities,” he said.

John Fitch, Skip Barber and Sam Posey broke ground on a host of improvements at Lime Rock on April 10.
photo courtesy Lime Rock

A new chapter in the history of Lime Rock Park was written on Thursday, April 10, as the track celebrated its groundbreaking of “Two Lime Rock Parks,” a multi-million dollar plan for track upgrades and repaving.

“The plan was to make the track safer, smoother with repaving and slow it down a little, particularly the downhill, without changing its character. We’re going to do better than that,” Track President Skip Barber said.

The plan is to improve the traditional Lime Rock race course by repaving it and adding better runoff areas. Meanwhile some new or optional track surface will be added alongside the existing course which will slow speeds down slightly. There will be three wide, slower corners with better passing opportunities, a wider and straighter back straightaway and additional runoff areas.

“There is nothing Mickey Mouse — no chicanes — about the optional Lime Rock Park,” Barber said. “Rather, it is a layout for the present — for the fast, high-tech American Le Mans Series cars — and for any other group that chooses it. It is also a layout for the future as cars and tires continue to develop. With the new optional corners, there are actually eight possible track configurations. It will be easy to switch from one course to another.”
For more information about the improvements, check out Lime Rock’s Web site.

(This post originally appeared in the May 1, 2008, issue of the Hemmings eWeekly Newsletter.)

Going through Philadelphia, Interstate 95 is a dangerous route, especially the elevated portion of it through the Bridesburg section. It gets icier much faster than the PennDOT crews can often handle it. One freezing night, I was driving back from a Ben Vaughn show and watched some nimrod blast past me in a BMW 320i, start pinwheeling on the glazed concrete, and then pinball the car off the dividers on both sides. I thought that if the air wafting from the chemical plants in Bridesburg doesn’t kill you, the nuts on I-95 will, only more quick. Its looks notwithstanding, this used-up 3-series, spotted in the BMW show area during the American Le Mans Series weekend at Lime Rock in July, is most likely not the same one I dodged that night. But it’s had its moments, for sure. For one thing, looks like somebody forgot to shut the driver’s door before backing up.

If you’re headed to this weekend’s Goodwood Revival, among the dozens of dreamy diversions will be an Art Deco-style car showroom with a matching petrol pump and kiosk. But wait, there’s more: Inside said showroom will be a multi-million-dollar display of road-going and race-ready Ferrari models from the 1950s and ’60s to drool over, including a legendary 250 Testa Rossa, a 250 GTO, a 250 GT Lusso and a 1967-season Ferrari 312 F1 car.

I have a little amateur racing experience and have logged seat time in everything from go-carts with centrifugal clutches to tandem-axle dump trucks with 10-speed Road Rangers, but, uh, as it turns out… I don’t know jack about driving a race car on a road course.

I did however learn a few things that I consistently do wrong:

â€¢ I turn-in to corners too early, thus compromising the all-important line out of the turn, at which point I should be accelerating like Warren Johnson instead of foundering around looking for the groove;
â€¢ I accelerate and brake too abruptly rather than squeezing the controls on and off in fluid motions; and
â€¢ Despite being of average build, weight and girth, I seem to have a problem with breaking zippers in fire suits. (I broke the one the Skip Barber folks let me use for the day and I broke my own in a race a couple of years ago.)

The funny thing was, before attending this one-day session, for media types, I always looked askance at the school’s Formula Skip Barber race cars — which are small open-wheel race cars with rear-mounted 130hp Dodge Neon engines and a four-speed non-synchro gearbox — figuring that I would feel more at home driving a high-performance street car.

Wrong again. I absolutely loved driving the open-wheel race cars and, by the end of the day, couldn’t have cared less about driving one of the school’s BMW M3s or Porsche Caymans. (I can’t believe I just wrote that, but it’s true.) If I were to return, I’d sign up for one of the Racing Schools (in which students drive the formula cars) rather than one of the Driving Schools (in which the students drive street cars).

None of the schools are cheap, but if you participate in any kind of racing, or if you just want to sharpen your street driving skills, Skip Barber is the place to safely and methodically improve your credibility as a wheel man or wheel woman.

Donnelly’s photo in the previous post reminded me of this photo that one of our readers, Walter Pietrowicz, sent in last month after taking in some vintage racing at Lime Rock (he didn’t send along a racer ID, otherwise I’d include it here). Thanks, Walter!